Proposal to move to Google geolocation services by default due to MLS's imminent shutdown in less than 1 month
With the announcement that Mozilla's location service (MLS) is shutting down (on April 10th, 2024), Geoclue will effectively stop working for users with systems not containing GPS. Upstream Geoclue will have to come up with a plan on how to address this, with a discussion started here, though, in the meantime, Geoclue fortunately comes equipped with all the tools for distro packagers to address this issue themselves.
Built into Geoclue is all the necessary functionality to use Google's geolocation services, but right now it requires users to manually edit /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf to uncomment the necessary 'url=' line to enable google location services, and, even more difficult, register and provide their own Google API keys. While upstream developers sort out what to do with Geoclue, I propose that Arch Linux package Geoclue with the Google services enabled and with Arch Linux's Google API key pre-populated. From my understanding, Arch Linux's Google API key (bundled into our own packages such as Chromium) should work perfectly fine for this use case and not violate any rules.
In conclusion, I propose that Arch Linux modify our provided version of /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf with the single line change detailed above, which will not only insulate us from the pending MLS shutdown in less than 1 month, but will consequently provide us with a much more accurate location based experience overall that what MLS had been providing.